A Plastic Sea of Green, Blue, and Pink

jewey

Jul 11

I don't even have pictures of Raven with Phoenix, the birthday girl. As soon as we arrived at Rainbow Town Play Centre in Glen Waverley, she just wanted to hit the play area straight away, giving Phoenix a quick hello before turning to me to ask if she could please already go play. Not with the other girls, because she didn't feel like going on the trampolines. She wanted to check the place out on her own terms.

I see myself in this kid sometimes.

The play centre was huge. We had never been there before and probably never would've if it weren't for the invitation. As Jeff was out on a shoot, I had to drive Raven there myself and pretty much followed her around just to be sure she's okay, missing out on catching up with Tammy and Mase who are such wonderful parents to Phoenix. We've known each other's families for several years now, setting up play dates for our girls who were born the same year, a couple of months apart.

The massive ball pit had us at hello. Germs be damned. We dove right in.

"Look at me, Mama, I'm swimming!" she said, pushing herself through a plastic sea of green, blue, and pink that I half-buried myself in. Totally ignoring my fervent request for her to come close to me so we can take a picture together.

So I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I went ahead and took selfies anyway.

When she wasn't going down the slides, Raven was building bunnies and halloween pumpkins on the Lego wall. She even created her own Duplo version of Peppa Pig house, complete with Daddy Pig, Mommy Pig, Peppa, and George that I thought was a staircase but were actually the said characters arranged according to height. It trips me out how imaginative kids can get. How they think outside the box.

Meanwhile, there I was struggling to create a cow that ended up with a pig snout and a pair of mouse ears. When asked what it was, I just kind of gave up and told her it was an alien.